From Duerer's animal sketches, the mimed animals of Renaissance "Fastnachtspiele" and the animal odes of anacreontic poets to Nietzsche's encounter with the "blond beast" and the brutality of Nazi war propaganda, German culture has brought the unknowable otherness of animal consciousness to light to elucidate the ways in which we use our projections of animals to "talk" about ourselves. Eschenbach's tales of monsters, Goethe's pursuit of the original "Urtier," E.T.A. Hoffmann's animal sorceries, the Grimm Brothers' animal enchantments, Freud's interrogations of animals as gatekeepers to human consciousness, Franz Marc's "Blue Riders," Kafka's bestial metamorphoses and the grotesque and fishy tales of Günter Grass and other contemporaries, all give unique testimony to the recurrent presence of animals and animality in the German cultural imagination. This session will explore examples of such visual, literary and historical portrayals of the fluctuating boundary between humans and animals in Germany both before and since the decried end of Humanism.